While browsing through the forums I just glanced at the amount of posts DP has accumulated, over 5 million, what size do you think the sql file would be and how would someone transfer the file to a new box if Shawn ever needed to?
The database is actually stored on several servers (according to last reports) and would be quite large (for posts alone if you assume each post took 20kb of data. I estimate the database would be somewhere in the region of 1GB to 5GB, but then that is just a guess =) Moving the SQL is not really that hard, it is reuploading in to a new server without timing out which is the fun bit. That is why you use a SQL Dumper to do it in stages =)